The Art of Fielding – Justin McAtee

Chad Harbach. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2011. 528 pp.

Chad Harbach, thirty-something scion of the same Brooklyn-based literary dynasty of Ivy-educated whiz-kids that gave us the likes of Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace, has recently joined the ranks of his aforementioned mentors as one of the most lauded literary talents in 21 st century America. May all young writers who presently aspire toward the title of Major American Novelist take notice: Not only does the bar rest very high, but Harbach has raised it with a document that proves his giftedness as a storyteller. The Art of Fielding is as stirring, sophisticated, and utterly convincing a debut novel as one can imagine—completely worthy of the hype it has received. The story’s drama centers on the virginal, unassuming figure of one Henry Skrimshander, feather-boned shortstop savant and mild-mannered savior of the Westish College Harpooners, a scrappy crew of Division III underdogs captained by the burly and bearded Mike Schwartz, an intractable Ahab of a captain who also happens to be Henry’s mentor, champion, and closest companion. Schwartz’s commanding, Greek-god physique belies an unorthodox dream among college athletes: to graduate from Harvard Law and become a public intellectual in the vein of Westish College’s sixty-year-old ex-football star president, Guert Affenlight, who three decades earlier forsook his own athletic prowess in exchange for Ivory Tower enlightenment. But now, on the cusp of a three-quarter-life crisis, his years of inquiry seem to have left him short in wisdom and long in reputation as an Ivory Tower figure of a decidedly different kind—an ultra-potent, post-tenure American male academic, deepvoiced, majestically bearded, armed with knowledge, and beginning to realize in the lurid light of life’s late afternoon that his coveted Scotch collection is going to outlive him. Things begin to fall apart for the three men in the space of a single day, and soon their lives are interweaving, the tension tightening under Harbach’s deft guidance. Henry makes an errant throw that hospitalizes a teammate. Guert falls in love with Westish’s most brilliant student, just as his daughter/intellectual prodigy, Pella, arrives in town to restart her life after a failed marriage to one of her former teachers. Schwartz realizes he has devoted four years to a cause he no longer believes in, and Henry’s close friend and only “gay mulatto roommate,” Owen Cross, is swept into a crisis of passion. Meditations abound on the cult-like rituals associated with different brands of American masculinity, with Harbach mining beneath the fist-pumps and black gown peacockery of athletes and academics to unearth the death-denying motivations behind them, a la Don DeLillo’s White Noise though here there’s far less cynicism The Art of Fielding is, rather,

a straightforward and conventional novel, more crowd-pleasing than literary. In fact, Harbach gives a negative appraisal of the postmodern novel he very intentionally did not write: the year [Prufrockian paralysis] went mainstream—the year it entered baseball…that might make for a workable definition of the postmodernist era: an era when even the athletes were anguished modernists…Affenlight found this hypothesis exciting, if dubiously constructed. Then he glanced at Aparicio, hands folded mournfully in his lap, and [this] excitement curdled to embarrassment. Literature could turn you into an asshole; he’d learned that teaching grad school seminars. It could teach you to treat real people the way you did characters, as instruments of your own intellectual pleasure, cadavers on which to practice your critical faculties. (328) “Doubt has always existed,” Aparicio said. “Even for athletes.” This is not to suggest the novel lacks intellectual credence. Harbach shows off his wit in abundant passages of deliciously sharp dialogue, though he doesn’t have to; his storytelling skills are nuanced and his narration fluid, each character’s mind pulsing with nervous energy and delicate observations. Their distresses are relatable and poignant, their interactions lively and wonderfully entertaining. Sometimes the sophistication of their vocabularies is a bit much, with Harbach over-calculating their speech and behavior at the expense of believability. This is hardly unforgivable, of course, because the scenes are that much more entertaining. Rest assured, this young author knows what he is doing; The Art of Fielding—all 500-odd pages of it—is tightly written, in an adroit and polished hand. If this book is any indication of Harbach’s potential as a prolific, crowd-pleasing writer with literary sensibilities, then America’s reading public are in luck. Read The Art of Fielding, savor it, and then get ready for more.